Rent extraction is a notion formulated by American jurist Fred S. Mcchesney (1948–2017) in his 1987 essay Rent Extraction and Rent Creation in the Economic Theory of Regulation. It refers to the phenomenon by which entrepreneurial politicians take advantage of the threat of implementing new regulations to obtain political support from interest groups that want to be free from regulatory interference. This strategy is in particular useful when a group has made specific capital investments that can be expropriated in the political process.